


The Other Queen

by sheafrotherdon



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Episode Related, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-01-12
Updated: 2008-01-12
Packaged: 2017-10-11 23:31:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/118365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheafrotherdon/pseuds/sheafrotherdon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As the intruders are brought before her, the Queen inhales, pulls their scent into her lungs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Other Queen

As the intruders are brought before her, the Queen inhales, pulls their scent into her lungs. Humans smell of so many things – fear, defiance, defeat, disgust. Each emotion is more palatable than the next, the flare of their instincts – flee or fight – a sharp, heady note in the scent of their sweat, heavier at the groin, beneath their arms, caught by the hair they have not yet evolved to do without. Their feelings, trapped damply against their skin, tantalize her. There is such feasting to be had.

She prefers the male of the species – the thick, cloying, hormonal scent of their fear, their often embarrassed arousal spiking up through their inefficient glands, _delicious_ , weakened, trembling as she makes them kneel. It is a languorous pleasure to rule, to choose food, to rarely be forced to feed for the base necessity of it. No careless, spread-fingered strike against starvation for a Queen – only dining, savoring, drinking in the musky sweetness of human life. And these men will do – all three. They will do very well.

They will play quite differently upon her palate, she knows. The tallest – her body yearns for the strength in his blood, the bitterness writ upon his face that will fill her cells with such deep and lasting satisfaction. His hatred – she curls her tongue around an incisor – she can taste a hint of its pungent, iron-rich depth in the breath he forces from between his teeth. He will give her the strength to make many more children, to regain the upper hand in this galaxy made of chaos. She closes her eyes for a moment, eyelashes fluttering to a temporary rest against her cheek – _oh_ , the warriors she will make from his loathing.

The shorter one – she opens her eyes to glance at him, to inhale the smell of sweat run through with pain and panic and, _yes_ , sweetest yet, a laughable note of courage that humans seem unable to quell within themselves. She cannot help but lick her lips in anticipation, futile bravery a salt-rich appetizer she had not anticipated – her blood thrums, and a sensual lilt rises up through the cadence of her breath as she turns her head and smiles at the last of them.

Their leader. Oh, how he will _fight_.

She knows he will resist long before she reaches out with the merest flicker of her mind to force him to his knees. He trembles, and she feels the pleasure of it deep in her gut, in some long-forgotten place that she knows was human once, a hundred generations before she was made, when procreation was more than a matter of female will, stolen energy, an insect's drive. She could, she knows, regress – indulge in arcane desire. Other Queens have – the stretch of their bodies, the arc of their spines as they surrender to the shattering pleasure offered by their worshippers lives carelessly on in hive memory. But this one does not worship – he struggles, shakes with the effort of holding her at bay, and she has not yet extended the full power of her thoughts. No, she thinks, this is better, this fight for control, this knowledge that she can take whatever he values most. Caressing his cheek, she pushes into his mind.

He grunts as she probes, gently at first, gauging the strength of his resistance. His mind is cool to the touch, reticent by design, a stubborn work of many years' study – she can appreciate, without passion, the flint and iron architecture of his hiding place. But appreciation is a response she finds easy to cast aside as she digs deeper, searching for the answers that the man at her feet will not, she knows, speak aloud of his own free will. His thoughts surge toward her, ebb away, a cold, blue tide of insolence threaded through with hope.

The taste of his rebellion will sustain her for many months. "I don't believe that I have ever encountered such resistance from a human before," she observes.

The leader twitches, fights her touch, grimaces beneath her caress. "I've had a lot of practice."

"Well." She smiles slightly, as though amused by the shiver of his imminent death throes. "There is a simpler way. Tell me what I want to know, or I feed on one of your friends."

She presses sharply into his consciousness, absorbs the painful rush of his thoughts, glories in his internal shout of despair. Seconds pass, a tumult of twisting spires and ocean salt, the call of gulls echoing – confusion – between glimpses of the short one, bent over a console; at dinner; asleep. The short one bleeds, falls, shouts, complains, saves them, meditates and – can this be? – causes this leader's heart to _break_ and . . . _oh_ – she tastes want on her tongue as fiercely as though she has already broken through skin. She knows, and chooses. "This one," she says, and points her finger so that the short one might be forced to his knees.

The short one babbles – she ignores him, used, by now, to the pitiful squealing of her food before it dies – and shivers when she touches him. His mind is not so impenetrable as the other's, and his thoughts are clear - _don't hurt him, let him live, let him live, please, god, please_. She glances at the leader – so strange that emotions could be so strong in these men and yet so wholly unacknowledged – then clears her thoughts as she raises her hand to strike.

The leader surges – laughable human, to imagine there is hope for any of them here, that he will not be caught, pinned by hands she built with the gift of her blood. But it is enough, his interruption, and she curses herself as her mind falls before the power of another, a Queen she cannot recognize – woman, warrior, powerful enough to still a hand so willing to feed.

"Take them back to their cell," she hears herself say, but the words are not of her choosing, and she claws, struggles to find purchase for her will within the borders of her own mind. "Get out!" she orders and – ignorant fools, her servants, her soldiers – her food is removed as though that were her want, the heady scent of waiting fear replaced by the dull, stale smell of an obedient drone. Her palate is robbed – the other Queen's presence consigns taste to memory. She seizes upon her anger, pushes back.

The Queen she finds within herself is not Wraith – her face is too warm, unmarked by the ink that befits her station, and her hair is not pulled back from her face in order that the now-healed slashes upon her cheeks might be seen and revered. She is wrong, all wrong, heat and light, parts of her body geared toward digestion instead of the dignified absorption of energy and life. "Who is this who dares to enter my mind?" the Queen asks, injecting what will she has at her disposal into the voicing of her thoughts.

"Who I am does not matter," says the other. "What matters is that I am stronger than you."

"Really . . . " the Queen breathes, borrowing the defiance of her prey.

"Even now I am gaining control of your body."

The truth of the other's words tastes bitter, poisonous upon the Queen's tongue. The strength of this woman, this Queen without a hive, this warrior with humanity in her genes and Wraith in her thoughts; she is formidable in her obstinacy. But there is something – fragile, growing, conscious but unformed, something, some _one_ who empowers this other Queen with grace. "There's another life inside you," the Queen whispers when understanding comes, and if, by now, her body is walking the hallways of her breeding ground without her authority, controlled by this other female, this human who lacks the blessings brought by insect and time – well. Her own mind, at least, harbors some sliver of power yet. "You cannot resist me forever."

She thinks of tactics. This is a war like any other, and if she acquiesces to the power of this other Queen's mind where physical control is concerned, she can focus her thoughts, bend her whole will to finding the life within this usurper, extinguish its hold upon its mother, upon _her_. She notices, barely, when her body lifts a hand to stun her drones; when she raises the gate at the mouth of a cell; when the humans are set free. But thought, internal, matters more than what happens beyond. "There it is, the other life inside you," and oh, how its fetal mind is sweet against the burrs and snags of her own.

The other Queen presses back against her determination. "John. Help me."

It is an irony barely to be borne that her own voice should call her end toward her, that the searing blaze of bullets entering her flesh should speed there at her own request. She is hungry, so hungry, and the leader's sweat, the ghostly imprint of his fingertips upon each bullet – she tastes loyalty as she falls, as she relinquishes the Queen and her child; tastes kinship, sibling love, an alien gratification that burns.

Her drones will find her, she believes imperiously as she bleeds upon the floor. But the hunger in her grows deeper, more bitter as her body struggles to repair itself – she has given so much to her children. She shudders and gasps as the hallways and chambers of her kingdom fall silent, and the only taste left upon her lips is the stale residue of gunpowder. Inhaling, she smells the leader's baffled pride.


End file.
